Choosing the right colours for your brand
Whether you’re a start-up, entrepreneur or designer needing some inspiration, colour choice is one of the most important elements when creating a brand. This is backed up by research which shows that correct use of colour can increase brand recognition by 80%.
When decided on a colour scheme, these tips can help you narrow down your choices.
Create a mood board
Experimenting with different colours is a good way to see how colours compliment or contrast with each other. Taking images and colours from existing brands and pairing them up on a physical or digital mood board will help bring your ideas to life and see if they work in practice.
Think about the user experience
This is key to ensuring you have chosen the right colour scheme for your brand. For example, culturally, colours can have different meanings and emotions attached to them. A good example of this is white, which in western countries signifies purity and hope, whereas in parts of Asia is associated with death and mourning. This is an extreme case, but you want to make sure that the colour you choose is complimentary of the product or service you are providing and appealing to the key target audience.
It’s all about psychology
Colours strongly link to different emotions and is why you’ll see similarities in colour choices for specific sector companies. For example, security and technology businesses widely use blue, which symbolises security, trust, intelligence. The image below showcases different colour meanings and may help you determine the message you want to deliver within your own brand.
Check out the competition
Researching your competitor’s website and brand style can give you a good starting point when deciding what direction you want to go in. If you want to stand out from the crowd your colours choices may be different, however, you may want to use them as a reference and use a similar colour palette.
There’s a lot more to colour choice than you may think. Just picking your favourite colour is not always the best route, and it’s important to put some consideration in to this as it is where your customers first impression of your brand will be made. Your chosen colours can quickly become a shortcut to people recognising your brand and establishing the overlaying tone your business takes.
